Random, p.1
Random, page 1
RANDOM
PENN
JILLETTE
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2022 Penn Jillette
ISBN: 978-1-63614-071-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022931938
All rights reserved
First printing
Akashic Books
Brooklyn, New York
Instagram, Twitter, Facebook: AkashicBooks
E-mail: info@akashicbooks.com
Website: www.akashicbooks.com
As always for:
Emily
Mox
Zolten
And in memory of:
The Great Tomsoni and Company
(This book is my world, and in my world
Johnny and Pam are still alive.)
PREFACE
In everyday life, you will find that your boss, your lover, or your government often try to manipulate you. They propose to you a “game” in the form of a choice in which one of the alternatives appears definitely preferable. Having chosen this alternative, you are faced with a new game, and very soon you find that your reasonable choices have brought you to something you never wanted: you are trapped. To avoid this, remember that acting a bit erratically may be the best strategy. What you lose by making some suboptimal choices, you make up for by keeping greater freedom.
—David Ruelle, Chance and Chaos
The Theory of Our Game:
Making a decision promptly is often more important than making the best decision.
Committing to and acting with passion on a decision are often more important than which decision is made. Doubt is the weakness.
No one can outsmart Random.
Random is dangerous.
ROCK/PAPER/SCISSORS—LOOK DEEP INTO YOUR OPPOnent’s eyes. She just threw this sequence: rock/rock/paper/rock/scissors/scissors/scissors/paper/rock/rock. You have won five of these last ten throws, including the very last one with your paper. This next one is the tiebreaker, but just a temporary tiebreaker, there will be more ties. You’ve got another ninety throws to go with her; the wager is for the best of one hundred throws. If at the end of those hundred throws you have more wins than she, you get the deed to her house. If she has the most wins, you are going to be homeless. You do not have any nest egg. If you tie at fifty wins each, you both keep your respective houses and you’ve both had a hundred throws of heart-racing excitement. You have both been alive in the here and now for about seventeen minutes, more life than many people experience in a lifetime. The tempo is slow. There is no rush.
Look hard into her eyes. Smell her. Feel the vibe in the room. Psych her out. While looking deep into her eyes, say: “My next throw will be paper, really. Honest. Pinky promise.” Does she believe you? Are you telling the truth? What is her optimum move? What’s your optimum move?
Your best bet is to throw random. In the long run random always wins. Your opponent can’t figure out your process if you have no process. But you can’t naturally throw random. You can’t generate random. No one can. Human minds generate patterns. It’s what they do. It’s what we do. Humans do patterns.
Some professional gamblers memorize π starting at the hundredth decimal place, and use those numbers to make decisions that their opponents can’t possibly predict. Random is power. Completely committing to random would be a superpower.
You throw paper and eventually … you win her house.
1
VEGAS HAS A BIG PYRAMID WITH A LIGHT COMING OUT OF THE TOP. Bobby Ingersoll was born and raised in Las Vegas, the son of a showgirl and a dissolute gambler. Before Bobby’s twenty-first birthday he had never once rolled a twelve on the dice, a roll that would have made him get into full drag to give a professional lap dance. He had occasionally tucked his cock and balls between his legs, put on lipstick, and danced in front of the mirror. But that he’d done just for himself, without any dice telling him to. He had always done what he wanted to do the most, all things considered. He’d made the best decisions he could with the information he had.
Two weeks before his twenty-first birthday he found out his dad, Dave Ingersoll, was over two and half million dollars in debt to Fraser Ruphart, who was the worst of some very, very bad bad guys in Sin City. Ruphart had demanded his money on the first day of June, which was the date Bobby was born.
Happy birthday.
* * *
Very bad guys aren’t fair. Very bad guys are not reasonable. Fraser Ruphart was unfair and unreasonable even by very-bad-guy standards. If Dave Ingersoll owed a good guy two and half million dollars and couldn’t pay, what would happen? Would the good guy just walk away? Maybe a very stupid good guy. Fraser Ruphart was neither very stupid nor very good. He knew the chances that Dave Ingersoll would ever pay off two and a half million dollars, given his entire fucking lifetime, were pretty low. Only Dave Ingersoll would bet on loser odds like that. So Ruphart recognized that a live Dave was only slightly more likely to pay up the two and a half million than a dead Dave. It was like hoping to win the lottery without buying a ticket. Your chances go up an imperceptible amount if you buy a ticket, but they do go up. What made a dead Dave more valuable was the advertising to future customers that they should make sure to pay their debts. But for two and a half million dollars, just killing the deadbeat wouldn’t be enough. For two and a half million bangs for the buck, Ruphart knew, you gotta kill his whole fucking family. That kind of advertising keeps you in first pay position with all your other customers.
Dave Ingersoll’s $2,500,000 debt to Fraser Ruphart came due, in full, on June 1. And on June 2, his whole family—Dave, his wife Kym, his children Bobby and Carolina—would all die. Ruphart might not be that good at figuring out who to loan money to, but he was very good at making the whole families of guys who didn’t pay him get dead. Would the family suffer? Yes. Would there be other very bad stuff happening to Kym and Carolina? Yes. Some of those very bad things would happen to Bobby as well. As the punch line to the old joke goes: “He has chosen death … but first boomsha, (or chi-chi, or boobalooba, or whatever the joke teller has chosen for his imaginary primitive tribe’s nonsense word for horrible, unspeakable, anal gang rape. In this case, it would be all those words right before the final punch line of death).
Do what you want to me but leave my family alone is the message Dave sent to Ruphart. It seemed a fair request between reasonable men, but again, Ruphart was neither fair nor reasonable. And Dave had just sent the worst possible message. When the carny talker out in front on the bally stage says, while gathering the rube crowd—the tip—“Let me warn you, friends, there are pickpockets out there in the crowd, please keep a close watch on your valuables,” the marks check their valuables with a quick reassuring pat. And the pickpockets, who really are in the crowd (and working with the talker), watch and see which pockets to razor to get the wallets. Do what you want to me but leave my family alone is a great way to signal to very bad guys that they should torture, chi-chi, boobalooba, and kill your whole family and do it in front of you. The smart move would have been for Dave to say, How about you kill my whole family, I’ll tell you where to find them, and leave me alone? Dave was a card counter from MIT and blacklisted at every casino as a cheat. If MIT or hard knocks could teach that kind of smart, Dave would have it. He didn’t.
Bobby didn’t want his dad to be killed, he really didn’t, but you can’t always get what you want, and he would have adjusted fairly quickly to his father being dead. He wasn’t ready himself to die on the day after his twenty-first birthday, but being dead is an easy gig once you get there. But even dead Bobby didn’t want his mom and sister boomshaed and killed. To keep himself and the only people he loved alive, Bobby needed to get two and a half million dollars in a couple weeks to pay off his father’s debt. You don’t have to be an MIT mathematician to know that works out to somewhere over a million dollars a week.
2
BOBBY NEVER THOUGHT HIS DAD WOULD BE ANY HELP in motivating him, but Dave had finally come through. Bobby had been motivated to procure two and a half million dollars in a couple weeks. He wasn’t going to earn it even though he had about the best job in Vegas. He drove a truck with a sign on the back advertising a service that would send a live nude dancing girl, or live nude dancing girls, to your private hotel room. He spent his whole shift driving this truck back and forth on the Strip. It’s one of the few truck-driving jobs where being stuck in traffic is considered a good thing. It means people on the street have more time to think, Wait just one single goddamn country minute … an attractive slutty woman or two like that coming to my room to do a sexy dance naked? … Hmmm … Maybe she or they would want to fuck me after she or they were done dancing (the “they” in this case could be either plural or the chosen pronoun whether the rube knew or cared or not), and call the number to book an appointment without doing any other thinking.
The attractive women pictured on the sign didn’t have to worry about dancing, or even going to rooms to pretend (for legal reasons) to dance. The women on the sign were just models. Bobby had nothing to do with the models or the actual “dancers” at all. He was just a truck driver. Bobby would pull any sign. Just the week before, he had pulled a Carrot Top comedy show advertisement and Carrot Top didn’t claim to dance, get nude, or go to anyone’s room—although there’s always a price for everything and Carrot Top’s fee is not unreasonab le.
Bobby loved his job. He listened to audiobooks, called friends, illegally texted at lights, and spent time with his thoughts. The truck had Bluetooth for his phone, air-conditioning for the desert, and GPS so his bosses could make sure he was just driving back and forth and not getting anywhere—a pretty sweet deal. Even in the Mojave in the summer, Bobby sometimes turned off the air-conditioning, opened the windows, and enjoyed the heat. Vegas was so hot in the summer, you could roll down the windows and laugh. It was like the heat was kidding. Probably funnier than Carrot Top dancing in your room naked.
It was a great job but it wasn’t paying him $31,250 an hour. Truck billboard advertising is not a cash business, so there was nothing there to rob. He went in anyway and conned a two-week advance out of his bosses. Good, now he was just under 1/2,000th of the way there. He was motivated to find other ways to get money. He, his mom, and his sister took out “payday” loans they could never pay back. The highest amount they could borrow together at rip-off interest was another $2,400—another 1/1,000th of the way to paying off his asshole dad’s debt. Barely another snowflake on the way to a lifesaving avalanche.
Bobby weighed his other options. He could ask all his friends for loans that he couldn’t pay back, but none of his friends had money. None of them even owned houses. His mom was renting. There was no equity in his circle. Many of his friends would know that his dad was in dutch to Ruphart. They might not know the amount, but they were aware that Ruphart didn’t loan single Benjamins, so they would know their money was lost the moment they loaned it. Bobby’s best bet was J.D., the one friend who might have some serious jingle. J.D. was a pro poker player who’d started playing online when he and Bobby were both in high school. He was good enough to have bought a stupid muscle car, and a 1961 three-tone sunburst Stratocaster with a Fender 1957 Custom Twin-Amp, for his own graduation presents. If the car and guitar were J.D.’s midlife crisis, he was on track to die at thirty-two. He’d turned twenty-one just last month so now he played live cash games in the casinos.
Bobby texted J.D. and rode his electric Vespa scooter over to the Orleans, a kind of locals’ casino off the Strip with a hopping poker room. J.D. lived there, in a hotel room right in the same building with the casino. He’d commute by elevator to the poker room around four in the afternoon, grind for ten hours, then go back upstairs and play more online. The Orleans had an oyster bar and metal alligators for door handles. It was a New Orleans Mardi Gras–themed hotel. Themes in Vegas don’t really mean jack shit. It’s all just the same slot machines, the same table games with different printing in one place on the table felt, and the same empty desperate vibe. Themes come down to a sign out front, door handles, and one restaurant—the rest is all just generic Vegas.
Bobby got to the Orleans, parked his Vespa in the Mojave sun, and headed into the timeless dark chill of the casino. He had a plan. Even better, he had several plans. He was going to ask J.D. to borrow a lot of money. And if he could get J.D. to show him his PokerWinner.com account, and get him to leave the room to buy Doritos or something, Bobby could tap his own PokerWinner account on his phone and in one hand lose all of J.D.’s money to himself. It wouldn’t work for long, but maybe long enough to put that toward paying off Ruphart. That would mean he’d get to deal with owing money to J.D. instead of a murderer. The final plan was to steal J.D.’s Strat and amp, and fence those. Whatever that meant. Bobby never considered himself the kind of person who stole things, but Bobby was in the situation where everyone becomes the kind of person who steals things. The Fundamental Attribution Error—we think what other people do is because of their character, but what we ourselves do is because of the situation we find ourselves in. Bobby was in a situation where his fundamental attribute was being a fucking thief. He was going to try to beg, steal, or borrow what he needed. He hadn’t decided on which of those was best with J.D, so he figured he’d try all three at once.
He followed signs to the poker room and there was J.D. with dark sunglasses and an orange hoodie. J.D. had talked about how much he loved poker, so Bobby wanted to watch him playing for a while. It was hard to perceive any fun that J.D. might be having. He had his earbuds in, and Bobby thought he was probably watching the game play, but who could tell through the dark glasses? J.D. wasn’t smiling, and wasn’t talking to anyone. He seemed to be having all the fun of someone on a pork processing line night shift. He folded most hands, and then did robot-like digital manipulations with the chips, shuffling them, rolling them over his fingers, and restacking them while waiting for the next hand. Bobby walked up and touched his friend on the shoulder. J.D. didn’t say goodbye to his fellow gamblers, just made eye contact with the dealer, nodded, picked up his chips, and walked away.
“Hey, dude, good to see you,” said J.D.
“Yeah, you too.” Bobby didn’t know how to play it. He was being friendly but also scared and desperate. He wanted J.D. to feel sorry for him so he would give him money, but also confident in him so he would loan him money—and also relaxed with him, so Bobby could steal lots of his money. A complicated set of goals for this acting exercise.
“You wanted to talk to me? Your text was très mysterious.”
“Yeah, can we go up to your room?”
“Sure. C’mon.”
They walked through the casino to the elevator and headed up to J.D.’s room. There was a room service tray of fried chicken leftovers outside the door, still some good eating left. J.D. touched the key card to the door, and they were in. The blinds were drawn. The guitar was plugged into the amp, with wired headphones plugged into the back. The vintage amp didn’t work with earbuds. On the desk was the fanciest MacBook Pro. Bobby sat down on the couch and J.D. sat in the easy chair.
J.D. wanted to get to it: “So, dude, what’s up? What do you need to talk to me about?”
“Nice guitar.”
“Yeah, you saw it when I bought it.”
“Are you gigging?”
“Gigging?”
“Playing out.”
“I know what it means, but we don’t talk like that. We aren’t musicians. I play poker and you drive an advertising truck. Hey, want me to order room service? I’ve been eating nothing but casino food for almost a year.” He looked it. He was getting the casino paunch and pallor.
“No, I’m good. Maybe we can run down and get something later.” Bobby was planting the seed that he might need J.D. to make a Doritos run while he emptied out the online poker account. “So, can you teach me to play online poker?”
“Sure, but that isn’t why you came here.”
“Right.” Change plans. Now it was time to beg. “Hey, listen, J.D., I need some money.”
“Bobby, if you want me to teach you to play online poker to win more money than you can ask me for, you’re not going to do it. You’re just not. There isn’t that much money there, and you suck at games. You have no sense of how to handle risk and chance and you can’t commit. You’re my friend—how can you expect me to do that when I know without a doubt that you’ll lose money at it? Does a friend do that?”
“It’s my own money that I don’t have that I’ll be losing. I know my chances. I’m not a fucking idiot. Be a friend. What a real friend would do is show me. Just give me what the fucking FAQ would have.”
“Okay. But you won’t win. Do you understand that you won’t win?”
“Okay, then for a few minutes at least I’ll have false hope. It’ll help me unwind.”
“Poker is not a game best played desperate.”
“I know, but dude, can you just show me?”
“Yeah, later. But what’s happening? Are you hitting me up for money? Is that why you’re here?”
“I’m kinda in trouble. You know, like a lot of trouble.”
“I’m not a fucking loan shark. Talk to your dad, doesn’t he know those kinds of people?”
“Yeah, he does, that’s who I need to pay off, those kinds of people.”
“How much do you owe?”
“I don’t owe any, but I have to pay my father’s debt and he owes a lot.”
“How much?”
